Rate of Change: A Closer Look

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Thu Jun 14 09:23:43 UTC 2001


--On Tuesday, June 12, 2001 1:03 am +0000 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

[LT]

> In a message dated 6/7/2001 11:19:18 PM, larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk writes:
> << We can imagine a lower rate of change, but there seems to be no good
> evidence for it.  Without some hard evidence, we have no right to assume
> that linguistic change was any slower in the remote past than it has been
> in the historical period.  Such an assumption would violate our linguistic
> Uniformitarian Principle: languages and speakers in the remote past
> behaved much as languages and speakers have behaved in the historical
> period. >>

> While I respect the trained linguist's ability to "feel" the relative age
> of a language, I must be firm in pointing out that "rate of change," as
> Prof Trask is using it, has little scientific validity - at least without
> confirmable numbers that anybody can double-check.

Oh, I agree with this.  Linguistic change has so many dimensions that no
one has yet been able to devise a metric for it, and I suspect that no
metric is possible.

However, perhaps Steve is reading a little too much into my words.  I was
certainly not claiming that the rate of linguistic change is constant.
Rather, I was only objecting to any suggestion that the rate of change, or
any other linguistic property, should have been *wholesale* different in
the remote past from what we see in the historical period.  If you have
good evidence for such a conclusion, then fine.  But, without such
evidence, it is out of order to assume any such thing merely because you
find the assumption convenient.

Have to stop here, I'm afraid: I still have a large pile of exam scripts to
be marked, and they have to be finished by tomorrow.  If I'm still alive
next week, I'll try to catch up a bit on these postings.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)



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